Emma Depledge

Emma Depledge (BA, MA Leicester, PhD Geneva) specialises in seventeenth and eighteenth-century British literature. Her research interests include William Shakespeare, John Milton, authorship studies, book history, royalist writing, theatre history and mock-heroic poetry.

Emma’s first book, Shakespeare’s Rise to Cultural Prominence: Print, Politics and Alteration, 1642-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), argues that the Exclusion Crisis of 1678-82 ought to be seen as the watershed moment in Shakespeare’s authorial afterlife. She is also co-editor of Canonising Shakespeare: Stationers and the Book Trade, 1640-1740 (with Peter Kirwan, Cambridge University Press, 2017), the first comprehensive study of Shakespeare’s print history, 1640-1740; and co-editor of a collection entitled Making Milton: Writing, Publication, Reception (with John Garrison and Marissa Nicosia, Oxford University Press, forthcoming). She is currently working on a monograph that explores the relationship between mock-heroic poetry and the London book trade, 1660-1740, a minigraph entitled Shakespeare and Paper, and a special issue of the Huntington Library Quarterly (with Rachel Willie), entitled ‘Performance and the Paper Stage, 1642-1695’.

Emma taught at the universities of Geneva and Fribourg before joining the University of Neuchâtel in 2018. Generous funding from the Fonds National Suisse enabled her to conduct research at The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA; The Huntington Library, San Marino; The Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library and Beinecke Library; and The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C.

Emma is on the Comité Scientifique of the CUSO programme doctoral de langue et littérature anglaises (http://english.cuso.ch) and frequently organises workshops and training for doctoral students.